« Muslims in Europe – challenges of identity and quantity »

01Juin

Conference of the Yearbook of Muslims in Europe

« Muslims in Europe – challenges of identity and quantity »

Vienna, 4-6 June 2012

Currently, a number of countries are conducting official censuses. Many of them include a question on religion. Where they don´t, a question on ethnicity or « nationality » is often used by researchers to estimate figures on religious belonging. Such censuses and other attempts to give Muslim population figures have their technical problems. But they also raise more profound issues of quantification and identification, not least of which is the question of political power: the role of the state (or the researcher or the media) in determining the categorisations which are important. Within this hides the more comples question of how people identify themselves, and why they do it the way they do.

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The purpose of this conference is two-fold:

1. To consider these and closely associated issues in the perspectives of the whole of Europe.

2. To give the contributors and editors of the Yearbook of Muslims in Europe the possibility of meeting and discussing the project and possibilities which it may give rise to.

Programme

Most sessions will be for the Yearbook of Muslims in Europe team, conference organizers, and invited participants, primarily academic staff and students from Vienna, unless otherwise stated.

16.15 Parallel groups workshop: Three groups to discuss problems of quantifying data on Muslims, facilitated by Riem Spielhaus, Birgitte Schepelern Johansen, and Jørgen Nielsen based on the Copenhagen research on opinion polling.

Jørgen S. Nielsen, Centre for European Islamic Thought, University of Copenhagen

Ahmet Alibašić, University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Moderation

Thomas Schmidinger, Department of Political Science, University of Vienna

Content

A century ago, in 1912, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire issued the so-called Islamgesetz (Islam Act), following the occupation and annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Islam Act gave Sunni Islam official legal status as a congregation. In so doing, Austria-Hungary became the first Catholic-dominated European state to give Islam an official status. With the immigration of Muslims to Western Europe the question of the status of Muslims became also a topic in France, Germany, Britain, and other European states. While Austria is presenting its legacy as an example for other European States, most of these states did not follow Austria. And also within Austria the officially recognized Islamic Religious Community is challenged by many Muslims and heterodox groups like the Alevis. This public discussion will address the relations of European Muslims and European states, with the Western and Eastern European experiences a century after Austria’s Islam Act.